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New analysis of a zero-day Java exploit that surfaced last week indicates that it takes advantage of not one but two previously unknown vulnerabilities in the widely-used software. The latest figures suggest that these vulnerabilities have exposed more than a billion users to attack.

Esteban Guillardoy, a developer at the security firm Immunity Inc., said the underlying vulnerability has been around since July 28, 2011.

“There are 2 different zero-day vulnerabilities used in this exploit,” Guillardoy wrote in a lengthy analysis of the exploit. “The beauty of this bug class is that it provides 100% reliability and is multi-platform. Hence this will shortly become the penetration test Swiss knife for the next couple of years (as did its older brother CVE-2008-5353).”

ONE BILLION USERS AT RISK?

How many systems are vulnerable? Oracle Corp., which maintains Java, claims that more than 3 billion devices run Java. But how many of those systems run some version of Java 7 (all versions of Java 7 are vulnerable; this flaw does not exist in Java 6 versions).

To get an idea, I asked Secunia, whose Personal Software Inspector program runs on millions of PCs. Secunia said that out of a random sampling of 10,000 PSI users, 34.2 percent had some version of Java 7 installed. In the same data set, 56.4 percent of users had an update of Java 6 installed. Assuming that Secunia’s 10,000 user sample is representative of the larger population of computer users, more than a billion devices could be vulnerable to attack via this exploit.